Fan Expo - 2012 Schedule

Hey folks,

While Gen Con is just around the corner you can't forget that Fan Expo is just around, just around that corner.  Like someone with a club ready to take your money after you deal with the first mugger.

That said, I'll be on a couple of panels and have a game to run, which will be fun.

To be fair, my panels are mostly me going to be sitting there and being very quiet since I'm going to be on some panels with @RobinDLaws and @montejcook, mainly because they use their middle initials in their twitter profiles but also because they're rather large luminaries in the industry.

Here are the panels and the times that they're going to be:

I wrote the narrative backstory of an Orc!, Saturday 4 pm room 715
Reflections on the gaming industry, Saturday  6 pm room  707
Board Game Design, sunday 1 pm room 715

I'm also going to run an undisclosed game of Critical!: Go Westerly at the follow time:

Friday, 3:00 pm room 706

Fun times will be had, and apparently I'm going to be doing a lot of sitting there and saying not much.

UPDATE: note that I'm not on the kickstarter panel and my game is earlier in the day. I think it's at 3:00 pm but I can be wrong at that.  It's just earlier in the afternoon, or whatever the afternoon slot is.

Gen Con 2012 - Schedule

So there's that Gen Con thing. I heard it's pretty popular and stuff. I have games, if you're interested in showing up for them. There is a problem, most of them have kind of sold out. The games in italics have been sold out.

Anyway, here's the list of events.


RPG1230182 You All Meet in a Tavern Thu @ 2:00 PM
Location: JW :: 312 :: 3

RPG1230185 A Cursed Night Thu @ 10:00 PM
Location: JW :: 312 :: 4

RPG1230183 You All Meet in a Tavern Fri @ 2:00 PM
Location: JW :: 312 :: 3

RPG1230184 The Importance of Being Gwendolyn Sat @ 2:00 PM
Location: JW :: 312 :: 1

RPG Review Recess - curse the darkness

I ended up picking up a game a little while ago called curse the darkness from Play Attention Games.  It had a pretty nifty kickstarter going, but if you missed that they're pretty close on getting the game out.  It was going to be arriving at Gen Con but printer problems being printer problem it's not going to make it.

The game itself springs from a simple premise, what if someone with enough anger and enough power could simply do away with all the things that they felt were the cause of all the world's suffering?  What if someone could use the shadows that have terrified us for ever and show that there really was something to fear?  It is ten years after this did happen, after His voice rang out of the shadows and entire cities fell beneath the powerful grip of his shadowy minions.  He declared that the only rule now was to take care of each other, all other ideology was banned and anyone not following those rules would be met with the only punishment available ... death.

Of course, this is funnily enough an ideology.  Something I'm sure that was ... Oh! AH! *dies*

I'm sorry, the previous reviewer made fun of HIM, and therefore was met with an untimely death.  Which is something you will have to get used to in this game.  Because ultimately it's not really about the individual people.  It's really a game that talks about cultures and societies and how we deal with this kind of stricture.  When you start the game, the gaming group will decide where they're located in the world, how they are following the rules, and how they're breaking them.  When I got to play this at Origins, and I really enjoyed how it gave you a sense of what your community was about and where you were going to end up transgressing.  Making a character is really just putting a few numbers down in your stats and coming up with a keyword that describes something about the character.  It's pretty simple, which is important because that character you just made up is no stronger than the piece of paper it's written on. If you want a game where you take one character and progress them from immaturity to power then you will want to go elsewhere because that won't happen here.  Your characters are made quick, and die faster.

That's okay though, because even in death they do serve a purpose.  There's a mechanic in the game that talks about remembering the falling, and bringing them up to help you through troubling times which is mimics with a memory point system.  Now, when I got to play this game there was someone who really was trying hard to game the system where they would try to bring up anyone no matter what the situation or circumstance, no matter what the relationship they had with that character.  This is not a flaw with the game, that's just going to happen sometimes because there are people who are like that and -- I didn't do anything!  What! *gurgle* *dies*

Okay, I am your third reviewer and let's talk about why there might be some gaming to be had with this game.  The rules themselves are very gameable.  It's kind of somewhat encouraged, particularly when it comes to things like Removal Challenges.

What's a Removal Challenge, well ... let me back up a bit.  The game revolves around two kinds of challenges.  The first is when no one has a chance of being killed.  That one just involves a target number and the current face up card in your applicable stat.  If you have higher, you succeed.  If you have lower, then you fail.  Nothing too traumatic, you just may need a different way to solve a problem.  However, once you've done enough of these Challenges you move onto the Removal Challenge.  That's where the live in death thing happens.  The players get a chance to stack the deck in order to try to get a favourable outcome out of the four available.  You either succeed and live, succeed and die, fail and live or fail and die. Of course your GM is trying to stack the deck against the players, so it's not like everyone isn't busy trying to figure out what's the best way to come out of this in one piece.

I'm not really going to go over how it works here.  This really is one of those games that you kind of have to walk through the steps in order to really get it.  Not that you need the Game Designer there to explain it to you, but after reading it I only understood because I had seen it played out.  It's one of those things that's kind of odd and complicated to explain but kinda really easy to show.  It's like magic trick that you just don't get until you physically hold the cards in your hand and go step by step through the instructions. I mean, no wait it's just illusions ... all in good fun ... I mean AARRRRRRRRRGH! *dies*

Okay, the one other big thing that I think is lacking is mentions of antagonistic play between the characters.  No matter what HE says, there will be moments when you just don't like each other and that's going to come to a head.  There are small things, like getting the ability to fresh (get more cards) for your stats when you shut down a memory conversation, but I'd like a really big section on what happens with being angry with each other.  I would probably like a little bit more of interest in a player when they curse the darkness as well.  A section on things you can do to help fuel that "keeping my head down" or even "being the informant" kind of way.  Something like encouraging players who have cursed the darkness to give points to the GM for when they feel that other players have broke the rules.

The pictures are pretty awesome, but I will say I am disappointed a little bit at the graphitti.  Not that I could do better than what's in there myself, but I was hopping for a little more subtle insertions of it.  Don't ask me how, maybe behind some text, on the sides, bigger, smaller ... just something to break up what I was seeing in the graffiti.

Ultimately, I think curse the darkness is pretty successful at what it does.  It gives you a very different frame work from a lot of different games, and really makes you look at the whole culture you're playing in, rather than just the characters themselves.  There's a lot of tension in the Removal Challenges, and in the way that you get to have HIM randomly show up unannounced to see if the players are breaking the rules.  Of course you ultimately have to decide if you want to keep fighting and light a candle, or just give up and hope not to be notice by cursing the darkness.

There, I survived that.  I guess we should have a funeral for the other reviewers.  Assuming we can find the pieces of them.  If you want the game, the PDF is currently available on DriveThru RPG.

People say even more nice things - Critical!: Review part 2

Brian Fitzpatrick (Fitz) over at Game Knight Reviews ended up getting a copy of Critical!: Go Westerly.  Apparently there's enough cool stuff that he feels the need to split the review in two, the first one deals with the world of Westerly.  This is a link to the second one, where he talks about the rules of the game.

Right now, you can check out Fitz' thoughts on Westerly here.

Let him know what you think there, or leave a comment here.  Feedback is appreciated!

People Say Nice Things - GameKnight Reviews Critical!: Go Westerly part 1

Brian Fitzpatrick (Fitz) over at Game Knight Reviews ended up getting a copy of Critical!: Go Westerly.  Apparently there's enough cool stuff that he feels the need to split the review in two, the first one deals with the world of Westerly.  The second one, that's coming later this week, deals with the rules of Critical! itself.

Right now, you can check out Fitz' thoughts on Westerly here.

Let him know what you think there, or leave a comment here.  Feedback is appreciated!

Let's talk about - Making Pregens for you Convention Game

This is something that's kind have been buzzing around my head since Origins.  It was a whole bunch of things, but basically it led to this kind of thought.

How do you split your genders when it comes to making pregens for your con game/adventure module?

If you'll notice, when we did Critical!: Go Westerly, which is available for the low price of five bucks, Geoff made sure that there were 4 women and 4 men.  Ultimate we ended with 5 women and 4 men, because of a quick of licensing that didn't pan out we had already created one character and included her anyway because her origin story is pretty funny, which ... kind is an anomaly when it comes to pre-generated characters.  I just went through some of the "free" stuff that was nominated for an Ennie and saw that when they had a chance to do a 50/50 split the adventure modules ... didn't do it at all.  There was usually just one woman character and the rest were all dudes.

This leads me back to Origins where there was a game that Geoff was running.  He was running the introduction campaign with a table of 8, which is the maximum that the game will go.  That means that there were 4 characters that were men and 4 characters that were women.  One of the players noticed this, and the first thing out of this mouth was, "Why are there so many women characters?"

Geoff replied, "Well, half of the population is made up of women.  So, half of the population of the characters are women too.  It only makes sense."

To which the player scoffed, "Not in gaming it isn't."

Which is of course, patently bullshit.  You didn't have to be Sherlock Holmes to notice that there were a wide variety of people, all of whom where there for gaming in some form or another.

We talked about it later at Big Bar on 2 with Amanda Valentine, who played in the intro game the day before this all happened, and she commented that she had instinctively picked up one of the female characters, and then a second one and stood there contemplating her options before she realized that there were two other characters she could pick from.  I believe, and she can correct me if I'm wrong here, she said that "One is usually all I get, two female characters is usually decadent."

Having two options is considered to be decadent.  Think about that statement for a moment, and then realize the fundamental absurdity of it.  I know if I have a stack of pregens put in front of me, I'm probably going to have more than two choices.

I leave this to you know, fellow game designer people.  If you're going to make a set of pregens for a game, a sourcebook, a campaign, or whatever.  Let's at least try to start making sure that we provide some equality here.  It's not that hard really, just make your characters and then sit back and look at them and count how many of each gender you have.  If it's not a 50/50 split then you should probably fix that.

Just saying.

Geasa - always learning stuff

You can never really know your own game well enough not to learn something about it. I ran Geasa for some friends tonight and got a pretty good wake up call on what not to do. I am now going to share this sage advise with you. This is in the hopes that you avoid this mistake.

When someone provides you with the opportunity to interact with their character, that is an opportunity you should take and introduce them to the story.  Flat out, right thing to do.  Starting to deal with a drug deal, and someone talks to you ... then you should probably make them part of the deal, even if they're ultimately going to be the ones taking you down.  Someone feels like their waiter needs to be talking to your character at your table, then let it happen and draw them into the story.  If you're too rigid with what you expect your character to do then you're going to either end up not having a lot to do, or you're going to end up isolating someone else.

Lesson learned, when someone says, "My character sees your character" that's when you walk over to say hello.